Romeo
and Julie in
Klan hoods

Part one

I am, at this writing, traveling on the American
highways and want to emphasize that this travel story in no way is
finished. To travel is for me not a question of finished excursions,
but of traveling into the human being along the way. And when can you
really call such a journey through our creator’s great melting pot
finished?
Some of the people who have fascinated me most in recent years are the
many "children of hate" I pick up hitchhiking on the American highways
- lonesome and down-hearted, they often stand on the roadside waiting
for days to get a lift, since nobody will pick them up. Since they
have met our rejection throughout their lives in similar ways, we are
surprised and shaken when we hear in the media how they suddenly
explode in hateful reactions towards the very society, which had
turned its back to them. It is such a pity, for it is my experience
from many years of traveling among the "children of hate" that you
hardly find more loving people. Not least is this the case for the Ku
Klux Klan.

If you immediately raise their eyebrows to this statement, I will ask
you during your reading to put away your own hateful and negative
thoughts about the Ku Klux Klan and try - at least for a little while
- to meet these people with loving thoughts. Already now it will dawn
upon you how hard this is and that hate is thus not monopolized by the
Ku Klux Klan. Rarely have I experienced this so strongly as right now
when I have managed to penetrate far into the very symbolic stronghold
of hate - the headquarters of the strongest, fastest growing and
according to experts the most dangerous Klan group in America, the
American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

My journey to become accepted by the Klan has been long, for I, too,
suffered from negative thinking about Klan people. First of all,
my black ex-wife gave me a thorough understanding of how they had
terrorized her home town, Philadelphia, Mississippi, and murdered
three civil rights workers there. Years later I had to fly my black
co-worker,
Tony
Harris, home in shock from a lecturing tour in Norway, when he on
national TV had seen the Klan shoot into a demonstration with
submachine guns in his hometown, Greensboro, and, among others, murder
his former girlfriend, Sandy Williams. So, yes, I am not blind to what
violence the Klan can contain. But already in these two cases I got a
bit of understanding when I heard about the poor backgrounds of these
Klan folks. One of the murderers in my ex-wife’s hometown was Jim
Bailey, whom she had played with as a child and thrown rocks after.
Being "poor white trash," he had lived in the same rotten shacks as
she did on "the wrong side of the tracks." Therefore, I quickly saw
part of their violence as very similar to the violent patterns among
blacks - brought about by the feelings of being ostracized and held in
contempt by society. For no whites with respect for themselves would
choose to live there "on the wrong side of the tracks."

Later I started going on lecturing tours in the USA and frequently
picked up hitchhiking Klan members. On these long and seemingly
endless drives, I had a good chance to meet the human being behind the
façade of hate. For the façade indeed was always an incredibly closed
and hostile face of the type which, right away, repels most other
people. But since I long ago had experienced the same patterns in the
most hurt blacks as well as in female rape victims, for example, I
knew intuitively that the people we discriminate against are those who
have themselves previously been hurt and discriminated against. It is
easy to love women who beam confidence and extroverted love because
they themselves have always met the same. But I am almost always blown
away by the hostility and closedness I experience in many rape victims
in the USA whom we afterwards further discriminate because they are
overweight, for example, when they frequently eat themselves out of
their pain. When it comes to racism, I have long ago learned that what
we discriminate is not color of skin, but pain - such as it often
manifests itself in a despairing cocktail of anger and hostility
patterns among those we ostracize.

When I have met these reactions we deceptively call "hate," it has
therefore always been a challenge for me to try to overcome my own
immediate negative feelings for the human being behind them and
instead show them extraordinary obligingness. Perhaps it started as
pure curiosity, but when I quickly discovered how much gratitude and
love I got in return, I began to see it as a kind of selfishness. For
we who have managed to go through life without encountering too much
pain have, of course, a craving for some love as well. And that you
don’t get - as you well know - without investing a little yourself.
That is, if you are among those lucky ones who have a surplus to
invest.

A typical racist I picked up in Georgia called for exactly such an
investment. He was closed and expressed himself in unmistakingly
racist tones. He owned nothing except for a little box of cassette
tapes, so in order to open him up a bit I asked him about his music
and got him to play it on the car radio. In my ears it was hideous
metallic music, but the more I asked him about it, the more he began
to straighten up with pride over the interest he suddenly was subject
to. And little by little I could begin to ask him about his childhood.
As I had guessed, he had been beaten terribly by his father. Yet he
added: "But I deserved a good beating because I was a bad child."
Here right away, I saw the typical link in the classical racist. Of
course no child deserves to be mistreated or humiliated, and by
excusing his father, he had inevitably projected his pain out on
others. In this neck of the wood, that naturally meant the blacks.
With his negative reactions to blacks, he therefore all the time
experienced the blacks react negatively to him, with the result that
he in the end became convinced that they were the cause of his deeper
pain. This is the vicious circle of oppression, which long ago made me
realize that the typical racist is just as much a victim as the
blacks.

But where is the border between common racism and direct hatred? That
I also discovered quickly - especially from hitchhikers I picked up.
In the solitude of the car, you have a better opportunity of
penetrating deep down into the human soul than in more superficial
meetings. This is what can make traveling by car on the monotonous,
boring American highways incredibly exciting. One night in Tennessee I
picked up a lost hitchhiker who at first seemed closed and impervious,
but something in his quavering voice made me suspect incest. Over a
long time I therefore asked him in a loving way about his childhood.
And sure enough, slowly - from the depths of his soul - there emerged
a ghastly story of a stepfather’s rape of him, which he had firmly put
a mental lid over. He was at any rate himself surprised by the
memories that turned up, but also about the fact that he had never
told anyone about it before. In just a short time this knot of a
closed person was transformed into one great case of gratitude that
would do anything for me. During a coffee break I showed him my book
(about underclass blacks) and suddenly he blurted out if I didn’t want
to come with him to the Ku Klux Klan meeting he was on his way to. I
had never in my hitchhiking years been able to track down this secret
organization. Now one of its members suddenly and lovingly opened up
to me and offered me his help in taking hidden pictures of the secret
cross burning - actually betraying his own friends. I knew that from
now on I could trust him, but really how grateful such incest victims
are for the help you can give them is showed by the following episode.

After the public recruiting rally was over in the afternoon, we sat
and ate in a McDonalds where I encouraged this dirt-poor Klan man to
use my credit card to call home and let his family know that he had
arrived safely. But now his mother told him how his uncle had just
been murdered cold blooded by two blacks. Suddenly, I saw his face
become transformed into all the hatred I had first seen in him. I was
doubtful if I now dared to trust this man to go with him out into
Alabama’s dark and deserted woods along with a bunch of mentally
deranged and hooded men burning crosses in something that I knew would
degenerate into mass hysteria. For now he knew everything about my
relationship to blacks. Never have I been more terrified. And it was
now myself who needed to call around to friends in America and family
in Denmark to say that if they had not heard from me before midnight
they should sound the alarm. It was one of the few times in my life, I
have shown courage. For you only show courage if you do not have deep
faith in the goodness of people. On that day I had my doubts and
really had to overcome my fear. Fear is based on seeing the negative
side in human beings, whereby we inevitably encourage evil. Today I am
glad that I chose to "show" trust in this child of pain. Such people
can feel so bad about themselves that they only attain a sense of self
worth from seeing that others fear them. For them trust is the same as
a declaration of love.

So I decided that I had no choice but to trust him and went with him
into the woods. I cannot say that I regret it, for during this cross
burning I recorded the most amazing pictures and soundtrack, which
have since helped make my slideshow into such a success. Our agreement
was that whenever I had taken a roll of film I would discreetly hand
it over to him, so that if suddenly the Klan members found out and
confiscated my film or worse, he would have the film and afterwards
send it to my family. Everything went fine since I myself was dressed
up in a hood-like coat under which I could conceal my cameras as
effectively as the Klan members could conceal their guns.

And so I here learned my first important lesson on the Ku Klux Klan;
that its need for love far, far surpasses its need to hate. Since then
I have unremittingly preached that love is the only way to cure
racism, but if I had not had it so dramatically demonstrated during my
Klan-friend’s powerful spiritual struggle and my own sweat dripping
doubts that night, my words would long ago have sounded hollow in my
own ears. For my trust in him was precisely not a matter of being
"blind" or "naive", but a choice. A choice about not abandoning human
beings in the very moment when they appear most terrifying - behind a
gun in the ghettos or a burning cross in the woods - just when their
shrill cry for help reveals that they need you the most.

On the personal level I have always felt that it was far easier to
help Klan folks and Nazis out of their destructive behavior than
common everyday racists because the cause and effect relationship is
so much easier to identify in them. At least when it comes to the
rank and file members. But is that also the case for the leadership?

This is what I have an unusual chance to examine, as I, at the time of
this writing, have succeeded in winning the confidence of the leader
of America’s largest Klan group, the American Knights. Two Danish TV
reporters last year followed me on the American highways to make a
program about my work and got the idea of confronting me with the Klan
leader, Jeffery Berry. Due to a rescheduling of my lectures, I could
not myself be present and had to speak to him in a pre-recorded video.
(I will later send a copy of that video). Here I told him about my
deep sympathy for the Klan since I had never met anything but deep
scars in the form of, for example, incest and childhood mistreatment
in the Klan people I had met. In their poverty and society’s
ghettoization of them they also in every respect in my eyes resembled
the black ghetto I had traveled so much in. It was maybe a bit bold
and brash to compare the Klan with the black underclass right up in
the Klan leader’s face, but the incredible happened. Jeffery listened
intensely to every one of my words without interrupting and afterwards
he said candidly: "I want to meet this man. Promise me that you will
let me meet this man."

It was obvious that I had touched something deep in him, so when my
lecturing now a year later brought me close to Indiana, I therefore
decided to visit him in his headquarters in Butler. Here in this poor
town, where everyone looked like Ku Klux Klan people, I asked around
for him and ended up with some shabby whites in a shoddy run-down
boarding house. They were all losers and drunks with feelings of
self-worth inversely proportional to everything they wanted to do to
get me to stay and give them a bit of attention. They all came from
broken families and hungered for love as they had met nothing but
hardship in life. Only after numerous beers and cups of coffee was I
permitted to leave. One guy in a tattered undershirt knew Jeffery
jolly well, for "Jeffery killed my father." And then I was given a
long story on how his father and Jeffery had long ago been drinking
buddies and how Jeffery had killed him. I didn’t really believe it -
as he himself was not really sure about the details - but the setting
somehow fit well with what I since learned.

For Jeffery was now in prison, I was disappointed to find out through
him. I nevertheless wanted to meet Jeffery’s family and was told that
his daughter, Tania, worked on a Clark gas station on the outskirts of
town. Here I gassed up and when I went in to pay I asked the attendant
if she was Tania. Yes, she said surprised. I then told her about the
TV-program with her father and asked if she was herself in the Klan.
Yes, she said and beamed with pride. She was extremely overweight and
appeared to have the same low self-worth as the others, but with an
expression of someone who has grown up in a narrow-minded persecuted
religious cult - a bit like the Mennonites I did a lecture for a few
days before.

She said that her father would "love" to get a visit from me in
prison. When you consider that she had lived all her life in a
despised Klan group, it was touching to see how open and forthcoming
she was. As with the others in the boarding house, she would not let
me leave, and even though there was a line of costumers behind me, she
continued talking and gave me free donuts to get me to stay. Already
here I discovered that the picture I had made of the Klan based on the
many lost supporters I over the years had picked up - who were nothing
but "children of pain" starving for love - actually also hold true of
the very top of the biggest Klan group in America.

When I realized that Jeffery was in the restricted part of prison not
open to visitors, I gave up my project and went out to the car. But
just as I was driving out of the lot, Tania came running after me
short of breath and knocked at the car from behind. This indeed took
her a great effort, for her overweight was great and the distance to
the car and the line inside was even greater. She came to tell me that
Jeffery’s wife, Pamela, had just come home from work, so I went to
meet her. Just like Tania, Pamela had a sad, subdued look about her. I
was now told all the details of what had happened with Jeffery. Two
TV-reporters had been there to interview him and had afterwards
reported to the police that Jeffery had held them hostage. Since
Jeffery had felt that they only came to portray him in a hateful
light, he had afterwards demanded to have their tape handed over.
According to Pamela, who had witnessed the whole episode, he had just
held them back for at most 5 minutes.

Pamela liked me right away and wanted to help me get into the prison.
I now drove to their Klan headquarters outside town, a dilapidated
house next to the Klan church with its big mobile cross of steel
outside. Hesitatingly Pamela invited me inside - hesitating because
the house was one big mess and at first reminded me of the shoddiest
black shacks I had photographed in the South. Yet, this turned out to
be the home of the most powerful Klan leader in the US - with local
chapters all over the world. As always with poor people, I felt a
great sympathy for them right away here in the midst of this dismal
poverty and began discreetly to ask her out about her childhood as I
always do with Klan people.

My cautiousness was not necessary at all, for like most of these poor
social casualties, she was just hungering for a human being to give
herself away to. I didn’t even need to ask about incest. It all came
pouring out of her automatically about a "weird" stepfather, who had
used her sexually, about how she had put a lid over it for years etc.
When she talked about all the years she was a drug
user, she several
times said apologetically that she had since become aware that it
probably was caused by those sexual encroachments on her in childhood.
I could have added - with my knowledge of other Klan people - that
this was probably also the reason she had found her way into the Klan,
but I didn’t say it as I didn’t want to take her pride from her.

When I asked if Jeffery had had a similar childhood, she nodded
approvingly, but said that she didn’t want to tell me all about it
right now - evidently because she didn’t want to compromise him as a
leadership figure. But at any rate he had suffered such terrible
beatings in his "dysfunctional family" that he as a child had run away
from home and since lived on the street as a "hustler," she said. Now
I realized to what extent I had hit the bull's eye with all I had said
to him in the TV-program about my sympathy for the Klan because I had
found that they all had suffered damage and social rejection similar
to what I found among my friends in the black underclass.

Through approaching the Klan with such loving feelings, I had thus
managed to travel into and steal the very heart of the Klan. For it
was at this moment I decided that I would later move in with Pamela
for some time to help her with the best of the counseling I have
learned in my many years of racism workshops. She is - completely like
the rank and file members - an incredible willing and grateful
"victim." And that in spite of the fact that she is now the real
leader of the world’s biggest and - according to the Southern Poverty
Law Center - most hateful Klan organization.

But perhaps that "hate" actually lies somewhere else, I now had to
ask? For neither she nor - as I later found out - Jeffery, as far as I
can tell, hates anybody - except themselves. That may sound surprising
for the leaders of such a large so-called hate group. But the more
time I spend with Pamela in private, the more I feel that all their
outwardly hate rhetoric is just an image they blow themselves up with
in order to get a little attention from the surrounding society in the
midst of their own unhealed pain. Indeed, that it is rather the
outside world that hates or has a need for someone to hate as much as
it is the Klan.

In any case, it is where Jeffery and Pamela have arrived today. For
both of them it is their first happy marriage. Pamela has been through
two marriages before - both with men who beat her badly as is seen
with many incest victims who seem to go around with an invisible mark
in the forehead screaming, "Beat me!" In the Klan they had hit it off
together. As she says: "The Klan is nothing but a lodge of like-minded
beer drinking people."

That I was witnessing a deep, deep love in this relatively short
marriage I saw when I photographed the large basket with all the thick
letters he had written to her from the prison where he had only been
for 3 months. Every day he writes. The prison will not give him
ballpoint pens, so he is always forced to borrow one from his black
fellow inmates. To further crush his pride, they have shaven his beard
and cut him bald like the captured Taliban fighters being held in
Cuba.

I seem to find every proof here in my usual declarations on how only
love can cure hatred (though love from a person outside the Klan would
have probably been even more effective). For since they found each
other she has made him completely give up his former hateful rhetoric
in public. As she herself states it "It just isn’t like him to hate,
he loves everybody after all." As a Klan leader he had just been
trapped in some of the hateful historic language of the Klan. What
made him give up his hate-talk was when Pamela convinced him that
nobody cares to listen to all that hate any longer in today’s
politically correct climate. And since Jeffery is starving for
attention and a sense of power, it didn’t take much effort to get him
to talk about "equal rights for all" instead. What had struck me when
I saw the TV-program in Denmark was that he never said anything
hateful. I have very often seen people, when leafing through the
images in my book, come with spontaneous hateful diatribes against the
pictured "lazy niggers," but Jeffery said nothing negative when he
leafed through the book and in fact defended the blacks against the
"negative" way I portrayed them.

Several times I heard Pamela say how she and Jeffery had loved all the
propaganda commercials that had run endlessly on TV since the World
Trade Center attack. The images of white, black, yellow, brown and red
Americans standing firmly together in one great brotherhood, making
America strong, had moved them deeply. They had immediately afterwards
changed the huge neon sign in front of the Klan church from the
previous "White pride worldwide" to "American pride worldwide." In
other words, they were now precisely where all other Americans stand.
The need of our deeper human pain to find scapegoats had become blind
patriotism turned against the evil out in the greater world rather
than against citizens in their own society.

Their love began to look like a Romeo and Juliet story for me - unlike
Shakespeare, not in each "klan" but within the same Klan - with the
outside world united in hate against them as a result of their clumsy
attempt through a stronger than usual youthful anger to struggle
themselves out of their childhood scars. And just at the moment when
they were about to succeed in struggling free of this anger through
their mutual love for each other, society launches a crackdown on them
and separates them from each other. Morris Dees - my old ally from the
Southern Poverty Law Center who has fought the Klan all his life -
gets involved in a harmless case concerning a quarrel between Jeffrey
and some TV-reporters in order to lock him away for life. There are no
witnesses and no injured people, only one word against another, in a
case, which in Denmark would not even have given a single day in
prison. In order to avoid a court case threatening him with 30 years
in prison, Jeffery pleads guilty to a lesser charge and ends up with 7
years.

I can’t help seeing the whole case as one huge
political persecution of the same kind I remember from the times of
The Black Panthers - an incredibly oppressive class society’s attempt
to pit the poor against each other, whites against blacks, through the
ruling media’s constant attempts to sell hatred and fear. For
Jeffery’s drinking lodge would have been nothing but such a drinking
club for "the children of pain" had not the media - also the Danish -
all the time come running to ask them to dress up in the symbols of
hate. Society’s oppressed and ostracized anger - Black Panthers with
guns as well as Klan people in hoods - are always willingly parading
and exposing themselves because they are starving for a little
attention as a substitute for the love they never had. Whether they
expose their pain on Ricky Lake shows or in violent instructed fights
on Jerry Springer shows makes no difference for them. If only they can
get their few seconds of fame and we - the better off in society - can
get our few seconds of justifying our hate or disgust for the poor. We
have not changed all that much since the Roman gladiator days. For
right when Jeffery is about to make it out of this hate-circus with
the help of his loving wife, a TV-station from Kentucky rolls up,
bringing with it hateful preconceived ideas of the Klan and not the
slightest empathy for Jeffery as a human being - and the conflict is
bound to break out.

The need of the outside world for gladiator entertainment tries to
keep Jeffery locked in the Coliseum arena in a life and death fight
with black gladiators at a moment when Jeffery is getting strength
enough to realize that the black gladiators are his real allies. It is
the surroundings which has seized Jeffery as a hostage - not the other
way around.

No white lawyers would take Jeffery’s case, only a black lawyer took
it with no qualms. When I asked Pamela if Jeffery had problems letting
a black lawyer represent him, she looked genuinely surprised at me and
said: "You have totally misunderstood him. Jeffery has absolutely
nothing against blacks, just as my own best friend is black." All this
hatred against blacks was in reality just the gladiator’s play to the
gallery. Jeffery had run a show about hate just as I myself had run a
show about love because of our different upbringings - insecurity
versus security -.which had made it natural for us to use different
kinds of rhetoric in order to reach an audience craving to hear both
parts. When first you have achieved some kind of success with your
rhetoric, you very soon get locked in by it, I knew very well from my
own experience. What matters is what we carry in our hearts. And there
I right away did not perceive much difference between Jeffery and
myself.

I had certainly not arrived with the intent of helping a Klan leader
out of prison, but the more time I spent in the Klan, the more I
realized that he was in every sense of the word a "political prisoner"
- railroaded into prison not for any crime - but for convictions
mostly attributed to him for the Ku Klux Klan’s terrible actions in
the days before he had joined. Therefore I now intend to join in
Jeffery’s defense in cooperation with his black lawyer, who thinks he
can get Jeffery’s sentence reduced. With my lifelong record of
struggling against racism in my work with American Pictures, I hope my
words will carry a little weight. It is a strange situation, because I
thereby suddenly find myself on the opposite side of the fence of the
prosecutor, my old ally Morris Dees, who successfully has been
fighting the Ku Klux Klan all his life. The question I now had to ask
was if Morris Dees had done anything to fight and heal hate.

Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center have tried to justify
their actions against Jeffery by putting his entire list of sins from
his angry youth on the Internet - and this is not to be sneezed at.
But without being asked, Pamela had already shown me every one of the
documents from his long catalogue of crimes. They only make me see
even more the similarity to the Black Panthers who had tried to
organize and recruit from a similar wrecked poor class, and who, as
fear-inspiring power symbols, achieved a sudden pride when they made
it into the media. Later they were destroyed from the inside by the
various crimes of their members from the "lumpen proletariat" as they
called these hurt and ostracized victims of the underclass. They lost
and instead of dealing with its pain, America has since decided to
lock that same underclass effectively up in the biggest prison
population any society has ever had in history.

No, the children of pain have never been the best
behaved! Jeffery’s 3-year old grandchild already walks around saying
"white power" as naturally as I previously heard black children say
"black power" mainly because she has heard it from the two parrots in
Pamela’s bedroom. They constantly screech "white power" after having
listened to the answering machine for years.

Bedroom? Well, if you insist. When I couldn’t find a bedroom in the
messy house, I asked Pamela where she slept. It turned out that her
"bed" was on the humid concrete floor in the storage room with the
parrots. Here we are talking about the leader of the world’s biggest
Klan group! Or are we actually talking of a poverty and social
oppression so dismal and powerless that it sees no other way out than
repeating after parrots puffing itself up in their borrowed colorful
feathers to get a little attention from the outside world?

For me there is no doubt, and therefore Pamela and Jeffery have my
full sympathy. They evidently feel that, and thus their family opens
itself up completely to me and shows me an incredible confidence. With
enormous curiosity I was permitted to go through all of Jeffery’s
papers already the first evening. All the accounts and membership
cards were lying around in a muddle, but nothing was kept secret for
me. And I was permitted to photograph everything. If there was a Klan
picture on the wall I thought was interesting, Pamela offered
immediately: "Well, take it with you." My car was so full of Klan
insignias that I was justly afraid afterwards to have it searched by
police - something that by the way often happens to me in America, but
never in Europe.

For an anti-racist like me, it was a dream-come-true to penetrate
right into the heart of this secret organization, which FBI-agents for
years have tried to infiltrate. But I discovered quickly that what I
was revealing here was not this lodge of poor, desperate heaps of
pain, but on the contrary the outside world’s need to hate that which
it refuses to acknowledge. Most clearly, I had experienced that when I
toured with my slideshow in Germany. The German youth, which was in
the midst of clashing with the Nazism of their parent’s generation,
were absolutely furious when I tried to understand the Klan or the
Nazis as human beings in my show. When I was not myself present at the
lectures, they paradoxically vented their hate towards my stand-in, a
black American. After some years like that, all my black employees
refused to stand and "defend the Klan" and fled from the hatred. Even
today I am bombarded daily with calls and e-mails from school children
all over the world about the Ku Klux Klan, and I often wonder why they
at such an early age - probably manipulated by their teachers - have
such a great need to make abominate other human beings and worship
evil. For it is hatred when we judge people only on their appearance
without making any attempts to acquaint ourselves with their
backgrounds. When I begin to tell them that the Klan are people
completely like themselves, they obviously do not wish to hear more or
become confused – brought up as they are in a world of computer games
teaching them destroy "the bad ones."

To travel is to search for self-knowledge, and in my journey into what
I thought would be the stronghold of hate, I first and foremost
learned to see the monster in myself.